Petrosexuality: The Real American Orientation
A reflective and deeply personal stroll through the worlds of sexuality and motoring
I’m a heterosexual man, at least in theory. How do I know that? Because when I apply for a job and I’m asked to state my sexual orientation, I fill in the box marked “heterosexual.” But my sex-life, as I’ve lived it, hasn’t exactly been a bold-faced testament to heterosexual male conquest. I’ve spent a vast amount of my post-pubescent life single, such that my self-description as “hetero” conceivably comes with an asterisk. My in-theory heterosexuality has evolved for a number of reasons, including lack of steady employment and a little bit of introversion, but most predominantly, I’d say, because I don’t own or drive a vehicle.
It goes without saying that gaining access to a car and the license to drive it is a rite of passage into adulthood in America. I’m repeating so many anthropologists and folklorists when I aver that this sort of initiation ritual is bound up with sexuality. The car — specifically the backseat — creates a space where teens can undertake sexual explorations galore. Moreover, the car allows a person to distance themselves from the watchful eye of authorities, in that it can take you and yours to secluded make-out spots, or to the house of whichever partner’s parents aren’t home. With that, the car and ownership thereof also creates a sense of precociousness and prestige. Cars and trucks are all the more important on the rural, rolling prairie where I grew up. Towns and farmyards were far apart, and the so-called “cities” lacked effective public transit. If you wanted a date, you had to drive to it. While a native New Yorker might be able to punch their V-card on the strength of the D-Train, in rural areas you need a vehicle (or, barring that, a horse) to do as much.
Nonetheless, for a number of reasons, I spurned a car. For one thing, I couldn’t afford the expense. Car upkeep seemed like a distraction. I was caught up in my schoolwork, fancying an eventual intellectual job and a peripatetic lifestyle in any number of metropolises. The driver’s test was just one more exam to study for — and one for which I couldn’t rely on my wits alone. Moreover, in my late teens, I wasn’t looking for a female companion impressed solely by sleek Supras and Celicas, to say nothing of pickup trucks. I was more interested in reading and writing than driving, and I thought romance could just as readily be forged on the strength of sharing these bookish pursuits with inamoratas. Such idealism, of course, is made to be crushed, and rest assured that it was — but not in short order. And so I disregarded the automobile, that great facilitator of sexual exploration, without repent, deferring the possibility of intimate encounters until college.
College was not wholly uneventful, yielding a few fleeting flings involving young women who were open-minded enough to experiment with dudes without wheels. But as soon as I graduated, I realized I’d fallen behind in so many ways. As far as finding a career with my meager liberal arts degree went, I needed to take every opportunity I could get, and a car would have been the bare minimum for maximizing these opportunities. In terms of the job search, it felt as if I was in an auto race on foot, which is less a simile than it is the literal truth. Having no car put serious limitations on jobs I could take (e.g. delivery guy, for one), and also where I could look for work. Hitting the pavement works better on wheels. Indeed, scheduling a job hunt around a bus schedule means you have to pick your spots carefully. I ended up recurrently settling for unsteady gig work, much of which could be done from home. The shame of being precariously employed hindered my dating game. In my darkest hour, I gave in to the lure of graduate school.
My unsteady career prospects precluded any sort of satisfying personal life, and these interwoven difficulties were compounded by not having a car. That I didn’t drive betrayed some deeper, damning lack within me — if others didn’t outright say it, both they and I seemed to know as much tacitly. When road-trips happened, it could never be in my car, nor could I take over the wheel to relieve the driver. When male friends and I caroused in our mid-twenties, meeting up with random women on rare occasions, it was never my car in which we motored back laughingly to more intimate spots. Making romantic and career connections became even more difficult in this post-undergrad phase, as friends started settling into responsible lives and long-term relationships. I came to understand that I lacked not just materially because I didn’t have a car, but existentially because I was not a driver.
So what was the nature of this paucity? To drive displayed the most rudimentary competency. It bespoke some minimal motor control, and some basic investment in one’s continued well-being. It brought you to the important things quicker and, in that sense, it illustrated your priorities. In short, it was a basic “life-skill” imbricated with supporting one’s self and putting one’s best foot forward, and I didn’t have it. You couldn’t properly have a family without a car. You needed to drive spouses to hospitals and kids to after-school activities. And obviously, the car could also be an advertisement for yourself and your personality. For male and female and transgender people alike, a garish Supra or Celica could demonstrate verve and zest, or a BMW could display upward mobility and discernment, or a big-wheel truck could convey bad-ass rugged individualism. To drive was to have drive. By comparison, walking was, in the fullest sense of the term, pedestrian.
Why, then, did I continue to turn my back on the car and forfeit all of the above? For one thing, I bristled at the potential hassle of repairs, not to mention parallel parking. What’s more, I was growing wary of human dependency on gas. Throughout my entire life, discussions of global climate change had been gaining momentum, and so I questioned the sustainability of petrol products and, by extension, driving. And within that geopolitical worry persisted a personal concern. In all that talk of driving as a “life-skill,” there seemed to lurk the intimation that if you didn’t drive a car, you somehow had less personal worth. You risked being unlovable if you didn’t drive. But I still believed myself lovable, and unconditionally so, and so I continued to refuse the car. While I may not possess the duende of a Lothario, I told myself, surely there was one person out there who could love perambulant old me and take me on in a sustainable relationship. I had to reassure myself of this as I saw friends marrying and reproducing.
Of course, not all relationships proved sustainable: via Facebook I saw friends move in with lovers and break up, get married and get divorced. And yet they always rebounded rapidly, because, by virtue of their vehicles, they could get right back on the road to true love. Whether in high school or in your 30s, automobiles were guaranteed to take you to your next paramour as fast as possible. For some of my friends with the slick cars and less of a focus on settling down with a family, this meant getting to a lot of night spots and, eventually, a lot of online dates and Tinder meet-ups. Some could boast of prodigious sexual tallies by the time they’d hit their 30s. Again, cars get you to point A, B, and C quicker, and if point C involves copulations, a driver is almost always going to have more intimate encounters than a walker as the years pass.
Taking a wider-angle view, cars are undoubtedly correlated with human overpopulation. For the first 300,000 years of homo sapiens’ existence, the population increased in relatively small increments. Then, in the 1880s, when the world population hovered around a billion, the first practical automobile was invented. About a century and a half later, we’re at eight billion. Certainly, we can attribute this exponential growth to decreased infant mortality and urbanization, but I think it’s hard to deny that the automobile is also a major factor in this population explosion. People were and are getting around more rapidly and making more sexual contacts. Sexually and reproductively, everything has been moving in fast-forward since the mass production of the automobile. But a non-driver like myself is still living in the Paleolithic age, proceeding on foot and hoping to meet someone charitable enough to pick him up. This is like hauling a boulder to a gun fight. As such, I can’t slay nearly as effectively as your average motorist.
I’ve mostly disabused myself of the idea that I’ll meet someone who’ll love me for me, as I’m out of shape (save for my calves, which have been sculpted by many miles on foot) and I’ve receded deeper into introversion, and yet I still will not give in and get that all-important car. Lovelorn or not, the environmental footprint of driving seems too severe to me. A world of eight billion car owners (or even a quarter of that) strikes me as unsustainable. The climate crisis can’t be denied (even though it constantly is), and the only viable vehicles going forward are, in my estimation, public transit or the electric car. But I remain an outlier. The promise of sex makes the big truck and the lustrous car and, inevitably, the family minivan the choices of the masses, whether they are conservative or liberal. At present, the automobile and functional sexuality — both recreational and reproductive — are interchangeable. There’s a car for every phase of the mating game. The world may boil, but players gotta play, and soccer moms need their sloppy spousal sex at the end of a hard day’s helicopter-parenting. Keeping the gas tank full remains the gold standard of human sexual and relational worth. It’s the purest measure of a premium-grade husband, wife, and parent.
And so I’m led to conclude from my personal experience that mainline heteronormativity, at least in America, is inextricably bound up with car ownership and gas consumption to such an extent that the term “heterosexual” is too general to describe the lifestyle that the majority lives. Perhaps the bulk of the active breeding populace is better labeled “petrosexual,” as gas consumption is virtually imperative with respect to having a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife. Of course, there are a few granola types and assorted car-free Casanovas who have happy sex lives sans motor vehicles, and I’d venture to say that they’re the only ones who can be called truly “heterosexual” in the barest, gas-divorced sense of the term. Even people such as myself are more purely heterosexual than sexually-active motorists in terms of thoughts, dreams, and aspirations, if not in actual deeds, since we seek a copulation not founded on gas consumption. But for most Americans, periodic trips to the car dealership and frequent trips to the gas tank are a necessary condition for ensuring physical intimacy with another.
Now, my focus here has been almost exclusively on straight people. Perhaps LGBTQ2S people’s sexual expressions are just as reliant on gas as those of petrosexuals who are straight and cisgender. Maybe most of us are petrosexual, no matter the target of our erotic energies. I have some doubts about this, however, partly on account of the fact that rural areas, the ones particularly reliant on vehicles, haven’t been the most amenable to non-heteronormative sexual expressions. (Truth be told, even my own non-dynamo status vis-à-vis women and non-driver status vis-à-vis vehicles was likely parsed as evidence of “queerness” by more than just a few family members and “friends” eager to weigh in.) All that said, I have hope for the future, not only for the environment but also for the sexual landscape. Maybe moving away from our reliance on petrol will create a new age of premium-grade heterosexuality that’s not dependent on or asterisked by gas consumption. Perhaps, with electric cars and public transit, we’ll realize a less hypertensive sexuality that’s free and easy, as cool and refreshing as the increasingly unpolluted air we’ll be breathing into our lungs as we thrust onward and upward and inward.
